The Calm After the Storm

I was in a bad way when I spewed all of that emotion onto the page, but thankfully things have settled down.

And yes, Rochelle, I’m still alive :)

Now that I can look back on what led up to that day, I see how it was a culmination of things that caused me to be so irritable and short-tempered.

I’ve talked a little about the Bible study I’m in this year, and I honestly I can’t say enough about how amazing it has been. I’ve called myself a Christian for 25 years, and in all of that time I’ve seen God work in my life, but it hasn’t been until this Bible study that I’ve really realized how He has been writing a story for me. We recently wrote our “narratives” and have been sharing them with each other. Our narrative is simply our life story as it relates to God working through our circumstances to speak to us.

I started out writing it like I’d write a blog post. I was trying to capture as many of the “events” in my life as I could while also trying to figure out what God might have been doing. The result was that it was 12 pages long and it only got me through age 15. That may not sound too long, but the goal was to share our story in 30-45 minutes which is equivalent to about 10 typed pages.

My wonderful mentor helped me hone in on my story more than the chronological events I had been so stuck on. I prayed that I wouldn’t plow through it like I was just writing an assignment, but that God would write it through me to show me things about Himself and about me that I maybe hadn’t understood before.

Boy did he deliver!

The process was very healing for me and helped me to work through some painful parts of my past. The twists and turns my life has taken don’t seem so random and haphazard now. I can see how God knit together all of that “junk” to bring me to where I am today. And also to give me a clearer understanding of His love than I’ve ever had before.

I’m hopeful that I’ll see future “junk” as part of my story too and that I’ll seek to understand Him in the midst of it rather than when it’s all in my rear view.

All that to say that I’ve been dredging up a bunch of stuff that’s been laying low for a long time, so I think I was particularly vulnerable to my current circumstances.

Grace’s potty training drama isn’t what made me so upset. That was just the needle that broke the camel’s back.

I was actually struggling with some of my core “woundedness” which is the lie that I’m unimportant and not worth anyone’s trouble.

Andy has been really busy with school and happened to have a friend in from out of town for a long weekend. The effect of all of that is that we were “ships passing in the night” most of the time. This made me feel like other things were more important than me, even though I know that isn’t really true.

Then there was the potty training chaos which was really just things not going my way. The control that I try so hard to have over everything is a coping mechanism for when I feel hurt. So the apparent reversal of all the progress Grace and I had made caused my coping mechanism to fail me.

None of my external circumstances were to blame for my impatience and anger.

That’s why I was having a level 10 reaction to a level 2 problem.

It was about my heart.

God doesn’t want me to cling to my sweet husband’s time with me or my daughter’s successful potty training. He also doesn’t want me to buy into the lie that I’m not worth it.

He wants me to understand that I’m loved and cared for by Him. As abstract a concept as that can be, it’s the truth and the only thing that really satisfies our wounded hearts.

I’m happy to report that Andy and I talked and cleared up the misunderstanding. My patience made a comeback the day after the potty drama and I decided to let Grace approach this on her own terms. She’s doing really well and although she’s not fully trained, she’s on her way.

And most important, I’m not buying into the lies that plague me, but I’m turning to my Heavenly Father who continues to reveal His love for me.